Widening Faultlines
Listen to excerpts from Outlook's Islamophobia issue,by Pragya Vats
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00:00 This is Pragya and I bring to you excerpts from current issue of Outlook on Islamophobia.
00:05 "Widening Fault Lines"
00:07 "What happened in New was not an aberration, there is a history to it"
00:11 writes Swati Shikha from Outlook.
00:13 On either side of a pond in Ghasera village in Haryana's New,
00:17 home to a large population of Neo-Muslims,
00:19 rest a Shiva temple and a mosque.
00:21 A stone's throw away from here, in 1947,
00:24 Mahatma Gandhi addressed thousands of Neo-refugees from Alwar
00:28 and Bharatpur in Rajasthan,
00:30 who were on their way to Pakistan and were staying at a camp in Ghasera.
00:34 Calling them India's backbone, Gandhi appealed to the Neo's to not leave India.
00:38 Weeks later, he was assassinated.
00:41 Decades have passed, the ground where Gandhi addressed Neo's
00:44 stands the government school, the only one in the village,
00:47 unofficially named Gandhi Gram Ghasera.
00:50 The village falls in the Mewat region,
00:52 located about 64 km southwest of Delhi,
00:55 in the Alwar and Bharatpur districts of Rajasthan,
00:58 and New, in Haryana.
00:59 A Neeti Ayog report identifies the region as the most backward in the country.
01:04 New, of course, made national headlines recently,
01:07 after episodes of communal clashes widened the divide
01:10 between the Hindu and Muslim communities.
01:12 Weeks after the violence, there is an uneasy calm in New.
01:16 A frail Muhammad Shadab Alam, 91,
01:19 greets us with a 'Salaam' at his family home in Ghasera.
01:22 When asked how old he was when Gandhi visited Ghasera in 1947,
01:26 the old master points at his teenage grandsons,
01:29 Wasim and Sohail, and says he had a similar build.
01:32 The family has lived here for generations,
01:35 but some members went to Pakistan during the partition.
01:38 We didn't want to go, but we had properties in Lailapur
01:41 and my uncles left reluctantly.
01:43 Baba, he refers to Gandhi, called us the backbone of India.
01:47 Later, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru brought back many Meos to India,
01:51 who settled back in Mewat.
01:53 According to 2011 census and population data 2023 of Mewat,
01:58 the total population of the district is a little over 10 lakhs.
02:02 Muslim constitute 79.2% of the population.
02:06 With a unique and also much contested history,
02:09 Mewat and Meos have been the emblem of Ganga-Jamuni-Pehzib
02:13 that India takes pride in.
02:14 However, post-partition, especially in the recent past,
02:18 the Hindutva brand of politics has referred to Mewat as mini-Pakistan
02:23 and fabricated stories to instill fear, hate and communal anxieties
02:28 amongst the Hindu population in the region.
02:30 For these and more, read the current issue of The Outlook.